PiBoIdMo Final Day 30: Laurie Keller Trusts Her Instincts (plus a prize pack!)

It looks as though you’re almost to the end of PiBoIdMo—CONGRATULATIONS! It’s impressive that you signed on for that big undertaking. I’d like to try it myself some time!

I’ve read through many of the previous PiBoIdMo posts and they’re all so inspiring and helpful. I’ve been trying to think of what I could possibly add to all the great writing tips and personal experiences people have shared and the one thing that comes to mind is to TRUST YOUR OWN INSTINCTS with your ideas and writing. It seems like such an obvious thing to say but of all the things I’ve learned over the years about writing, learning to trust my own instincts might be the most important.

I have a massive collection of books and they are a constant source of inspiration. There are certain authors and illustrators I can’t get enough of and their styles have had a huge influence on my own work.

There have been times when I’d be working on a story or illustration and it just wasn’t working and I’d realize days or weeks later that the reason was because I was unconsciously trying to emulate someone else’s style. After working and reworking it again and again, eventually there would come a day when I’d be in just the right mood and my own “voice” would “speak up” and things would finally gel. I’ve learned the hard way that when I try to draw or write like people I admire it only ends up being, at best, a poor man’s version of their style.

When I do school visits, I talk to kids about writing and we draw together, too. I show them how I draw an otter (based on my book, Do Unto Otters) and then I encourage them to turn it into a character—a pirate, a rock star, a scientist or whatever—and then hopefully later write a story about it.

I let them know that even though we’re all drawing an otter, each one will be unique and different from anyone else’s. I love that about drawing and it’s the same with writing. We could all write a story about a banjo-playing pelican (don’t you dare though—that one’s MINE—I just thought of it!) and there’s not one of them that would be alike. You have your own unique way of telling a story so do all you can to develop that.

Lots of people have asked me to review their manuscripts over the years and I’m still surprised at how many try to write just like well-known authors—namely Dr. Seuss. Editors aren’t looking for another Dr. Seuss. There was and always will be only ONE Dr. Seuss. They want to hear fresh, NEW ways of telling a story. What if Dr. Seuss had tried to write like William Shakespeare? “Would thou liketh them in a box? Would thou liketh them with a fox? Those are the questions!” Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? With all due props to Mr. Shakes, thankfully, Dr. Seuss trusted his own instincts. To any Dr. Seuss wannabe’s—yes, he is a wonderful source of inspiration but take the qualities you like in his work and DO YOUR OWN THING with them. We can’t wait to see it!

As far as book ideas, they can come from anywhere, as you know, and there’s no one right way to get them. There will be times when you know what you want to write about and other times an idea may just pop into your head. When you can’t think of what to write about there are lots of techniques for generating ideas and to get your brain thinking in unexpected ways (you must know many of those exercises by now). As a writer, there aren’t many things that make me happier than when I get a book idea I’m excited about. There’s no way of knowing which ideas will be popular with readers so I’ve learned that the most satisfying thing you can do as a writer is to write what YOU like and tell it in YOUR voice. The rest will fall into place.

I heard a saying once and I’m paraphrasing here:

That really resonated with me and I think it’s spot on when it comes to writing. HOWEVER you come up with your book ideas, trust that gut feeling—your writing road map.

CONGRATULATIONS, AGAIN on completing your challenge. I wish you all the best with your writing. HAVE FUN and DON’T QUIT!!!

Laurie is giving away an ARNIE THE DOUGHNUT PRIZE PACKAGE! It includes: Arnie the Doughnut picture book (one of Tara’s all-time favorites!), Book 1 in The Adventures of Arnie the Doughnut series: Bowling Alley Bandit and “Arnie the Doughnut and 4 Other Fantastic Adventure Stories” Weston Woods/Scholastic DVD.

This prize pack will be given away at the conclusion of PiBoIdMo. You are eligible for these prizes if:

On the last day of PiBoIdMo my local Art Gallery in Rockhampton, Queensland opened an exhibition of Lynley Dodd’s original artwork for the Hairy McLairy books, and a lot of her other artwork too! Very inspiring to see the drawings up close, and hear the little kids speaking with wonder and joy at seeing Hairy!

“There’s no way of knowing which ideas will be popular with readers so I’ve learned that the most satisfying thing you can do as a writer is to write what YOU like and tell it in YOUR voice. The rest will fall into place.” Yes. Thank you! As an aspiring (i.e. unpublished) writer, I worry about this issue all the time. Wonderful post. I’m really going to miss these posts when, starting tomorrow, they are no more…

Thank you for the reminder that we all have a unique way of expressing ourselves (especially when my inner censor often says, “Oh, there’s so much out there already so why try”… It’s so important to do something because you love it and trust your gut to show you the way… 🙂

We are BIG Laurie Keller fans here (she came to my kids’ school a few years back and we have a signed copy of Scrambled States of America that is WELL-TREASURED), and now even more. Loved and needed this reminder! Hard to trust my gut sometimes, but if Laurie Keller says so, I guess I’d better! 😉

I am glad your post comes today, Laura, as I often have too much space between my fingers holding on to such truths! Especially when it comes to illustrating for others – it’s tough to remember to please yourself first! Thank you!

Thank you for the advice. It is very important for us to stay true to who we are instead of trying to be someone else. When you are yourself, you are at your best, everything sounds natural. Will do my best to trust my gut.

You have helped me see what makes the difference in my pb ideas writing – the ones that work the best are the ones I ‘feel’ – that gut instinct. Now I will pay more attention to that.
Great post to end this marvellous challenge. Thanks! (And thanks again, Tara!)

I can certainly see & hear your own style in DO UNTO OTTERS–a classroom favorite! Good advice to follow your gut, which I was trying to explain as a life lesson to my 9-year-old the other day. Works for so much.

I LOVE your stuff and appreciate your advice. “gut” or “instincts” — paying attention to what’s most important to us and putting it in our voice is perhaps the perfect way to round out PiBoIdMo advice. Thanks!

That’s such a great point to make about not trying to mimic someone else’s writing style. It’s the same way with illustrating. In art school, we try painting the same painting as our favorite painters and illustrators to see what we can learn from them, but then we need to work out our own way of illustrating. That’s the hardest step.

I love that you draw w/ the kids on your school visits. I’m not that brave yet. When I draw in public, nothing turns out. I’m just starting out building a portfolio for illustration. My gut told me to join an illustration critique group.this year, so I found one…and joined! 🙂 Thanks for the post.

Thanks for posting this. You want your work to be marketable, salable, and likeable. But what if you are so attached to an idea, but others view it as “not ready for the market”? It seem like those are the ideas I get. I love the comment about Shakespeare and Dr. Seuss. It makes sense. My grandmother always said, “You wouldn’t send a beauty queen to do a job better suited for a cop.” So I get it. Each has its own purpose and does a good job within their own rite. Thanks for posting this; it was great!

I love the “Otter”! ! It’s a tough challenge to trust your gut feeling not only in writing but in every day life. Great advice and I love when it happens…when you do trust and everything falls into place! Very inspirational post and thank you for sharing

Laurie, your Shakespeared version of Green Eggs and Ham had me laughing out loud! My boys LOVE The Scrambled States of America. Thank you for writing something educational that is also so much fun! (your book and this post.)

Hi Laurie, I love the visual of the road map. And I really identified with trusting your gut – love this quote – “so I’ve learned that the most satisfying thing you can do as a writer is to write what YOU like and tell it in YOUR voice. The rest will fall into place.” So true!! This is a “print-out, hang above my computer” quote. Thanks – your books are adorable!

Indeed our PiBoLdMo 2013 race of completion is upon us…What we do with our collected ideas is up to us. Following our gut, writing with our heart and use our voice will give us the confidence to know our work. Thank you for sharing.

What a great post. I love the fluorescent bulb! I love the quote you referenced as well. Trusting our gut and using our own voice is great advice. Thank you for sharing your story and best of luck to you!

Love your lightbulb!!! When I do school visits, I can’t draw. But I do talk about having someone else do your illustrations. I tell them to close their eyes and give them some simple storyline text. Then have them picture it in their mind and raise their hand. Everyone’s picture is different. 🙂 And it is so much fun to see their creativity. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

My dog was missing for 7 emotional hours this week. It turned out he was safe all along because my first instinct about his location was correct. The experience made me realize how powerful our instincts and intuition really are, so this post hit home for me. I think the important thing about following instincts as a writer is tuning in to not only the positive rah-rah instincts, but also those nagging ones you may want to tune out. Thanks for the post! – Amanda Sincavage

My kids and I love Arnie the Doughnut. That is how they discovered doughnuts and they always try to find one with chocolate and sprinkles. Thanks for the reminder to trust my gut and let my voice come out instead of someone else’s.

I love this post. Trust your gut is good simple advice yet not so easy to follow. So important for letting our voice shine through. Thank you for telling as to so! The proof this works is in your wonderful books.

What great advice. I’ll admit I have been trying to emulate some of my favourite authors and it never seems to totally fit or work with my ideas. Thank you for your wonderful post on our last day of the challenge!

This holds especially true for illustration I feel! In the beginning you learn from the artists you love but to become truly amazing you have to be yourself and make your own art. Thank you for the lovely post!

What a great final message for the month. Thank you so much for bolstering our beliefs in ourselves — sometimes difficult to hold onto as we come face to face with the ‘amazing-ness’ of someone else’s writings/illustrations.
And yes, nothing makes me happier than a book idea I’m excited about.
Can’t wait to get acquainted with all your books. The titles alone are fantastic.
* Proud to see a Michigander closing out the month! *

Write on! Great advice! Thanks for sharing your ideas about trusting your own instincts. So many of us doubt ourselves and that stifles our creativity. I love your illustration style by the way, and your environmentally friendly idea light bulb is awesome (and it will last longer too)!

Thank you, Laurie, for the reminder to do what we ‘otter’ and follow our own instincts. We write to please others and it is tempting to listen to all sorts of things that play off our insecurities. Trusting our instincts will make our work more cohesive —- a single voice rather than the cacophony of many.

Laurie, thank you for your wise words about following our gut and using it as a road map in life and writing. Your post is the perfect “cherry on top” of a wonderful PiBoIdMo, and I’m going to miss getting these great scoops of inspiration and advice each day. Thank you Tara, thank you writers, thank you illustrators, thank you participants. Now time to get writing and trusting my gut. So…in a chair I’ll put my butt, and I won’t forget to trust my gut!

I loved this blog posting so much because your gut feeling is your road map to life in general, and it’s so sad how we often lose sight of this through the journey of getting published. Especially when you get critiques, you get so many people telling you to do diff things its frustrating and sometimes you lose sight of what YOU want to do write. Thanks Laurie for reminding us whose voice matters the most, the author.

The whole PIBoldMo month has been a road trip with a map full of truths and advice. Laurie’s directions for trusting your gut is great advice as we begin a new journey into revision and development of our stories.

Thanks, Laurie, for that final push and nugget of wisdom. My gut says there are important stories that I need to write and that I should be doing that now!
Thanks, Tara, for an amazing month of inspiration and ideas!

One does need to be conscious of the different between being inspired by and mimicking the voice of whomever we are reading. Sometimes the line blurs. Thanks for the post!
PS – loved your funny light bulb sketch.

Trust your instincts…This is so true. I recently submitted a ms to an agent and she said she really connected with it until she got to a certain point in the story. I guessed where it was in the story that lost her. I was exactly right…I knew it was wrong, but didn’t know how to fix it at that point. From now on I will trust my instincts. Thanks for all the encouragement, Laurie!

Thanks, Laurie for the special last post. I shall miss the daily posts but wow, I have a store of information and inspiration to keep me going. I loved your words and you are so right. Our own voices and characters are what will always shine through. Your books look great.

Thank you, Laurie, for this grand finale of posts. It really resonates with me, Recently, I was awakened in the middle of a deep sleep by a voice screaming, “You’re writing someone else’s story!” I had lost my way in following too much advice. Now, I definitely know better. Thanks for the great reminder!

Laurie – I love the saying about gut feelings being the best road map we can have. It’s interesting how much we have to fight to hear our own instincts trying to speak to us! I’ve really enjoyed this month of inspiration. Thanks to Tara and all the guests who took time to write posts.

Bravo, everyone! Thank you very much. I look forward to editing my idea list down and helping my readers find my stories. I was surprised at the amount and quality of the ideas I generated this month and how everything coalesced at the end. Thank you Tara.

So many wonderful things in your post, not least your advice of course! The way you use your otter in school visits to remind kids how each of their drawings and therefore stories will be different is excellent. I’m going to do that with my children – and it was a great reminder for me too. I also love your eco-friendly bulb! Thank you for sharing with us, Laurie.

Laurie, thanks for the encouragement. Looking at my month’s list of scribbled ideas, I see I’m going to need to exercise some of that instinct-trusting to figure out how best to work with them. Onward!!

Just wanted to say that we LOVE Arnie the Doughnut in our house. My son has a stuffed donut & has named him “Artie” . So cute.
Such creativity!
Yes, trusting your gut has brought you past the finish line. Kudos!!

I agree. Sometimes you’re the only one who will trust your own gut feelings, but if you believe in yourself . . . others may too! So, I’ll be even more careful not to throw all those rejected stories out the window 😉

Laurie, thank you for the wonderful advice. I have three daughters and my oldest (almost 15!) was given Arnie the Doughnut as a gift when she was little. All three love it so much that it is literally falling apart. In fact, I can probably recite passages by heart. Thrilled to year that there are now more in the series. It is a privilege to “meet” you 🙂

Finding our voice is the first step. Perhaps we need to be like a baby, scream it out. Learning to enjoy our voice is the hard part sometime.
Thanks for the positive message,
Lynn
BTW I love ARNIE THE DONUT

Thanks for your advice,Laurie! I have found that when I question myself about whether something I’ve written is really needed in a story, most of the time it isn’t. If we learn to trust our instincts, our writing will improve. Blessings to you!

I never, ever trust my own instincts. I am always worried about what others (editors, peers, crit partners) will think of the story.Thank-you for showing me I should tell my stories in my own way. No more holding back. Thanks.

I love that you give permission through your words to take inspiration from other authors. That seems so obvious, but I think it’s something many of us are really afraid to admit to ding. Impossible not to be inspired and/or influenced. Thanks for creating awesome books for our awesome kids!

There are lots of things I love about this post but mostly, I love your advice to trust your voice (I mean, MY voice, not yours. Though yours is pretty funny!). And, um… I kinda want to do Green Eggs and Ham a la Shakespeare. 🙂

I love Arnie, and am so excited to see that he is branching out into chapter books! YAY! Scrambled States of America is another awesome book, so I can’t wait to read Do Unto Otters. I believe in trusting your instincts, as well…thanks for the encouragement!

Laurie,
Thank you for your posts. I have been writing for over 10 years and have started drawing again. Haven’t done this in years… seriously at least. I was trying to copy others with my illustrations and then I thought, “why can’t I just draw it like I want instead of the norm?” So I did and guess what!?! I liked it! I think you have to find yourself in your writing and let it come out. Can’t wait to read some of your books. They are very cute!

To me, interacting with kids (and teachers and parents and librarians) is the most satisfying part of writing and illustrating for kids. I take an approach that is very similar to yours Laurie when I visit schools. In what other venue can you get 100% direct and honest feedback from your number one audience?

I’m happy to say I managed to complete this year’s challenge with more than 30 PB ideas and I KNOW it was because of inspirational posts like yours. To wake up each day and KNOW I will find a motivational blog to help inspire me to seek out the unique story ideas only I can tell. I’m really going to miss these daily posts but since I’ve archived all of them, I can just go back to reread them whenever I want…;~)

Great advice to trust your instincts! I wrote a MG novel that kept tugging me in one direction, but I fought it, trying to avoid what I considered a trend. An editor critiqued it and said, “I think this would have been really great as a ____ book” (the very thing I was fighting all along).

Yay! It is Day 30 of PiBoIdMo and I wrote down at least one picture book idea for each day!
Boo! It is Day 30 of PiBoIdMo and I will miss these incredible posts!
Thanks so much, Laurie…I used to be the ‘navigator’ when my husband and I took road trips many years ago (pre-GPS days)…so I really appreciated your reference to ‘our feelings are the closest thing we get in life to a road map’…so true!

Thank you so much for your inspiring post! Arnie the Doughnut is my fave of all picture books out there! I know … you have probably heard that before but really seriousy it is!!! As a librarian for 2 elementary schools, I read many picuture books to my students. Arnie is their favorite also . I have even sewn a huge stuffed Arnie that I bring with me to woirk!!! The kids are always asking…. Please read us Arnie!!! And don’t forget to bring your big doughnut!!!!””
Thank you so much for bringing such a cute book to the “Picture Book World”. I would absolutely love to win your prize pacikage!!! I am truly an Arnie Fan!!!!!!!

Huge fan! Arnie was my go-to read aloud at my kids’ school when they were younger. Thanks for your advice about listening to our instincts. I will keep an ear out for what my gut says. (And now that catchy YouTube song will have different lyrics inside my head!)

Thanks, Laurie. I love that you show children we would all draw the same character differently. What a cool lesson for them on our uniqueness. And I never really thought about how true that is for writing as well. (I may just use that in a future school visit!) But I still wish I could draw…it proves the point in a more fun way for kids. And I love the gut feelings are the closest thing to life’s road map. I’ll be using both of your words of wisdom for sure. Wishing you continued success.

Thanks Laurie for this post. Trusting our gut instincts when writing is so important, inappreciate your post about it. I love reading current best selling PBs to see that is going on in the market, as well as what is fresh craft and idea wise. But , I think that one it comes down to it, you have to write what you feel and trust that someone else in this wide varied world will feel it to. Thank you for the inspiration!

The kids and I enjoyed Do Unto Otters, but I love Doughnuts!!
Is it weird that I’m feeling guilty about a blog post about ideas where my image was an old lightbulb not a CFL bulb? How much did that blog post negatively impact the environment??

I do tend to follow my gut feelings. Sometimes it’s hard to “stand up” to fellow critiquers whose suggestions pull your story in a different direction. Thanks for the encouragement to trust my own instincts!
What a great month this has been for inspiration and new ideas!

I LOVED “Do Unto Otters” (mostly because I love otters and manners, and bunnies that mess up (they’re so cute – they have GOT to be imperfect somehow!))! Great advice and I really like the lightbulb image! 😉

Your advice is a treasure…I’m sure most of our instincts are deep in us. Sometimes so deep they are ignored or pushed down by what we see around us. Thanks for encouraging us to dig ’em up when needed. Thanks Laurie!

Your post is a great way to finish up PiBoIdMo. Love the otter-drawing-create-a-story with kids. I’ve often thought a fun postcard mailer would be to collaborate with several other illustrators on the same ‘subject’ and sending out the end results to showcase each person’s Voice. Thank you for the inspiration!

Thank you Laurie for your words of inspiration. As an illustrator and wannabe writer, I have an easier time writing in my voice. Trying to draw “with my voice” (or is it eyes?) is harder. Finding a unique drawing style is my ongoing quest. Glad you were able to focus and tune-in to your authentic art.

I love the way that you let kids know that even though everyone is drawing an otter they will all look different! That is what is so wonderful about the creative arts! There is not just one right way to do things — and the more we compare ourselves to others, the harder it will be to find our own unique voice!

Learning from others and not mimicking them is a great tip. It is the same in the art world; many artist trying to paint like another and not developing their true self in what they create. The freedom and enjoyment is in being authentically creative. Originality can get lost in the pursue of publication.